Thursday, June 28, 2012

New Orleans Ice Cream Co.: Putting the freeze on Savory Simon

From their bakery in the Faubourg Marigny, iconic Hubig’s Pies turn up on grocery shelves, in racks at hardware stores and even on restaurant dessert lists (try the twice-fried example at the walk-up Bayou Hot Wings).

More recently, they’ve also been turning up in pints of ice cream in grocery freezers. Savory Simon, the portly mascot of Hubig’s Pies, even rides shotgun on the label.

Hubig’s Apple Pie is one of the latest raft of new flavors from New Orleans Ice Cream Co., a five-year-old local company that is evidently out to convert any conceivable sweet New Orleans flavor into an ice cream.

The New Orleans Ice Cream Co. churns out packaged pints and tubs of ice cream, primarily intended for the grocery store market and for restaurants. The company was a post-Katrina concept, and when developing flavors this company looks to food associations and cooking customs that strike a chord with New Orleanians.

Chunks of Hubig’s apple pie in vanilla is one of those. Other newly minted examples from the brand include brandy milk punch, baked Alaska, lemon doberge cake, peach Melba, café au lait and beignets and “satsuma dreamiscle,” or vanilla ice cream with a citrus streak.

Still, New Orleans Ice Cream may be best known to some as the purveyor of the flavor “chocolate city.” It’s chocolate ice cream with white chocolate flakes that is named, of course, in reference to former-mayor Ray Nagin's much ballyhooed speech about the racial makeup of New Orleans after Katrina. These days, Nagin’s name mostly comes up in discussions of ongoing federal investigations, but the ice cream flavor he helped inspire still draws chuckles, and spoons.